The 6th Annual Sustainability in Packaging Conference was held at the Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate, Florida, March 12th-14th.

The first panel titled “Driving Packaging Innovation in the Supply Chain to Keep the Value Proposition” included presentations from PepsiCo, S.C Johnson and Nestle.

First up was Tony Knoerzer of PepsiCo—he is the gentleman responsible for the Sun Chips compostable bag. In explaining his experiences bringing the compostable bag from R&D to market, Tony provided insight into how PepsiCo integrated innovation into the supply chain. Here are a couple presentation take-aways:

Knoerzer touched on the age-old debate of using food (corn) to produce compostable plastics—as in the case with the PLA-based Sun Chips bag—when so many people are starving, by emphasizing the importance of “context.” According to Knoerzer, in the US, 40% of the corn grown is harvested for conversion into ethanol due to governmental subsidies. Therefore, it is in PepsiCo’s opinion that compostable plastics should not be targeted for compromising the food supply because so much more is being harvested for ethanol when compared with that used for PLA production.

Knoerzer inquired, “How do you create value in supply chains?”

Historically, it has been by leveraging scale in order to attain operational excellence and organizational capability. Innovation, however, by its nature lacks scale; therefore, organizations need time to achieve organizational excellence.

The way to facilitate this transition is through collaboration with suppliers with whom you develop a shared knowledge strategy. This relationship looks to build trust and a long-term agenda; to replace anecdotal data with hard facts; and, allow for the interaction of technology, which rests entirely on the ability to move past a pre-competitive strategy. “A supplier is not a grocery store of technology to be acquired. Invest in what you need to know, with the right horsepower; if you think knowledge is expensive, try ignorance.”